The Museum at the End of the World Read online

  “White?”

  “Ask our Mr. Denton.”

  “Say the first name again.”

  “Bukka.”

  Chris waved.

  “Bukka White.”

  Treading down the lino traps on the stairs, how pleasing the morning had been…

  Chris’ voice again.

  “Pardon?” Rob called back up. “What?”

  I’ll get Fiona to cut the crusts off.

  the street, the ancient, ramshackle houses,

  how pleasing the morning had been

  the disgusting barber, the pigeons and the revolver, gin and hot water and the botanicals, Chris’ pronouncements and improvisations and the bounteous flow of his knowledge, his frock coat, all this, Rob thought, all this, trying out in his mind this new word duende, all this mildly louche kind of life was where he was intended to be; all this, he thought, all this was home.

  *

  “Mr. Palmer is awaiting you, sir,” said the waiter, “at his usual table.”

  The menu under his arm had a yellow tassel at the end of its cord. More a goodish tuft than tassel and Rob followed it, scarcely taking in starched napery, the blur of diners braying, gilt frames, walls of salvaged brick.

  The waiter halted and ushered.

  “Jimbo!”

  Jimbo stood and tossed his crumpled napkin onto the table.

  They embraced briefly.

  “Jimbo! It’s been so long!”

  “It’s ‘James’ these days, Rob.”

  “What?”

  “‘James.’”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “’Fraid not.”

  “And that suit! Posh! Anyone’d think Savile Row.”

  “And anyone would rightly think so,” said Jimbo, shooting his cuffs, flashing links of silver and jet, “for that is what it is.”

  He composed a Varnished Portrait Face.

  “Bespoke,” he said, “from the Henry Poole atelier.”

  “And the shirt, Jermyn Street?”

  “Guilty,” said Jimbo, “if you’re accusing.”

  “Admiring,” said Rob.

  They sat looking at each other.

  “Drink?”

  “Absolutely,” said Rob. “One of those’ll be fine.”

  Jimbo caught the waiter’s eye, pointed down, twiddled his finger round.

  “So,” said Rob, “why ‘James’?”

  “Jimbo was another person.”

  Rob nodded slowly.

  “Actually,” said James, “the suit is necessary. It’s a uniform, if you like. A badge of rank, as it were. I am, what shouldn’t say so myself, squire, personable. And as such, tend to get despatched to hotel suites to charm and chivvy along certain clients into this course or that.”

  Rob nodded.

  “Surely you must see that the House of Oldfield cannot be represented by a ‘Jim.’”

  “So tell me,” said Rob, “how you got this Oldfield job. The degree business—being sent down—that didn’t count against you?”

  “No, no,” said James, “not at all.”

  “What did happen at St. Edmunds? I heard something from my mother via your mother but you can imagine the vagueness… it was, according to her, well,… the gist of it seemed to involve a Memorial Window and a bayonet…”

  “Poor soul,” murmured James.

  “I have taken the liberty,” said the materializing waiter, “of bringing a little jug of non-carbonated spring water.”

  James nodded dismissal.

  “So come on, Jim—sorry—James, GIVE.’

  “Well,” said James setting down the glass of Pernod, “have you ever heard of a tome called Select Charters by one Stubbs? William Stubbs. Expired 1901. This Oxford chap actually expected us to read it and based all his lectures—Oh, God! I never could. And it weighed on one so, the non-reading of it, I mean, it was like carrying around a paving slab. That, I suppose, was the start of it. But the essence of the matter was that I was supremely bored. I don’t think I was temperamentally cut out to be in statu pupillari.”

  He shrugged.

  “I realized I was much happier in the Ashmolean and the Pitt-Rivers where I spent most mornings recovering.”

  “So was there an exam or anything to get into Oldfields? I had the idea these houses were besieged by women waving degrees in art history, debutantes and heiresses from America. No? And grim graduates from whatname down there off the Strand, No?”

  James made a pshaw noise.

  “Anyone,” he said, “can learn that stuff. Simple factual stuff. Those Courtauld people can tell you to the hour when some quattrocento artisan farted, but what they can’t tell you is whether it’s a good fart or a bad fart or even a fart fake.

  “Oldfield asks only two questions—they assume knowledge. The questions are ‘Do you have the makings of an eye?’ and ‘Do you go after properties like a barracuda?’ The Courtaulds are rather, well, righteous, whereas Oldfield’s—you’d have to dig pretty deep to find anything Quakerish in Oldfield. The dominant ethos is…”

  He picked up his fork.

  Regarded the tines.

  “…more piratical.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “So two of us were plucked from humble circs and raised to the purple. Money was advanced for gents’ suiting and Annabel got a couple of posh—what? suits? no, well, outfits. I don’t pay as much attention to feminine matters as I probably should.”

  While the waiter hovered, James said, “I could recommend the sole unreservedly and do you know a Loire white called Sancerre?”

  Both nodded to the waiter.

  Tapping his forehead, James said, “Couture. Make mental note. But enough about me. Bristol sits well? Are you still consorting with, mmm…”

  “Cecilia,” said Rob. “No. We found we lacked…”

  He felt himself suddenly not at ease, constrained in talking to James about what then had been his ruling desire and Cecilia’s reluctance. Odd, he thought, this sudden reserve, given their boundry-less boyhood. When he thought now of Cecilia, the thought was often accompanied by a remembered line in an Evelyn Waugh novel: “she made him free of her narrow loins.” Cecilia had not made him free of her loins but had she done so, he thought now, he would have found them juiceless, joyless, stingy.

  Loins doled out.

  And him left feeling like Christopher’s pigeon.

  “…what shall I say, we lacked a commonality of interest.”

  “Thank God,” said James. “That wicker basket.”

  “What!”

  “On her bicycle. Emblematic. Indeed, the very bicycle idea. Ankle socks, stalwart calves. She was so obviously destined to embrace a future,” said James, shaking his head sorrowfully, “decorating the Parish Church for Harvest Festival with enormous marrows. So what do you do there? Bristol?”

  “I’m reading a lot. Taking what appeals, what I can use.”

  “Use for what?”

  “I’m not sure really. I’m just…” he shrugged. “I don’t know, just looking at things. Poking around. After those sixth-form classes, it’s all a bit like a rest home. I’m feeling my way around. Paintings. Bristol Old Vic, Music, some. Some days I go up to Clifton, to the zoo, to visit a very ancient gorilla called Albert. But you. You’re really happy at Oldfield?”

  “Rob,” said James, “I can hardly wait to get there every day. Love it. Love it. And the actual auctions. If you like the Bristol Old Vic, you’d love an Oldfield evening auction. The tension in the room. Heat rising. Bids duelling. Coming off the wall. The phone. The white flashes of paddles being raised or quavering down in indecision. It has an utterly gripping rhythm, the quiet chant of it, the auctioneer driving it, setting the pace, the conductor at the podium, Old Mr. Vine on the rostrum.”

 
James lowered his chin into his neck and mimed an ancient peering over spectacles.

  “I have twenty thousand in the room. It’s not with you, sir. Nor with you, madam. And it’s not with Magda on the telephone. It’s in the room, with Mr. Curtis, at twenty thousand. Do I have twenty-one? Twenty-one? Fair warning now. All done? In the room, in the room,”

  —his gavel raised, poised, his eyes travelling the room like an ancient tortoise.

  CRACK

  “with Mr. Curtis in the room at twenty thousand.”

  Rob grinned at James and mimed clapping.

  “But,” he said, “you haven’t told me the how of it.”

  Lifting a lapel, James said, “You mean…?”

  Rob nodded.

  “Ah!” said James. “The situation was this. I’d applied to Oldfield’s for a job as a porter—as in ‘one who carries’—and I was assigned to British and European Painting. The lowliest of gofers, you understand. So for four months I lugged paintings about, dusted things, washed frames in warm water and mild soap. You have no idea of the chaos and squalor of behind-the-scenes. Made up packages. Helped getting the lots lined up in order in the corridor and storage behind the auction room. Picked up Francesca’s dry cleaning. Flowers for wives or boyfriends.

  But a slow change began. I was asked to help one of the probationers in deciphering the handwriting on ancient labels on the back of frames. I was loaned to Prints to collate a couple of disbound Redouté flower books. Small changes, small changes. But straws in the wind. And if British and European was in portering doldrums, I hung about other departments and asked questions and borrowed books and monographs and asked if I might touch things. Made note that Mr. Bedale loves Extra Strong mints and made sure I always had a little bag of them when I visited his storeroom. Whatever their bark, they just can’t resist teaching the ardent and attractive young. I, of course, being the attractive forementioned.”

  Looked up at the waiter.

  “Capers?” he echoed.

  “Chef suggested, sir, hearing it was for you, that against the richness of the butter, they assert a pleasing piquancy.”

  “Did he, by gum!” said James. “Well, yes, give it a go, then.”

  “Blimey!” said Rob as the waiter withdrew.

  “‘Shimmered,’” said James. “Remember how we used to laugh at Jeeves ‘shimmering’ in? Anyway, after work one day there was a group of us, me—the lowly porter—and the others were probationers, we were ‘volunteered’ to get the lots marshalled into catalogue order, and supervision that evening had fallen to Oriental Ceramics—Freddie Godwin, very jolly, very avuncular, and he said how about playing a game before we started and the winner gets dinner free. So he proposed a sort of Kim’s Game.

  “Remember?

  “Those unbearable Christmastide festivities where one’s parents invited in to the Christian jollity of our homes forgotten aunts with ricochet hearing aids and the most colourfully afflicted in the congregation, and after excruciatingly tense pig-trough dinners, after the mince pies, before the carols, Kim’s Game was attempted.

  “Difficult to say anything in the Major’s favour, but he did put his foot down following incontinence on the couch.

  “Where was I?

  Wine?”

  “Kim’s Game,” said Rob.

  “Right.”

  James sipped.

  “But in this game you didn’t have to remember the items, you had to guess what they were. So Freddie gathered up fifteen things from the stockroom and laid them out on the table and I actually scored twelve. One of the things we had to identify was the material covering the copper sheath and handle of a dagger—and let into the material there were Arabic characters in silver. The material actually looked rather nasty—like heavily pebbled plastic. Freddie went round the table, various ridiculous leathers were proposed, embossed hide, rubber—Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Turkey, Ottoman area generally, and I said, very off-hand,

  “‘It’s shagreen.’”

  “Sorry?” said Rob.

  “Shark skin.

  “And by this time, Edged Weapons—Charles Burchill—and Drawings and Watercolours had wandered in asking what we were doing. The noise we were making, I thought. So anyway, I went on to say that I didn’t think it came from the Middle East at all, but from India. And that the silver letter groupings were pseudo-Arabic, the craftsmen not being Arabic speakers. It just didn’t look right. Just a feeling. Like pseudo-Kufic script on Abbasid-dynasty pottery.

  “And Tribal Art had appeared, moody bugger, leaning against the door frame with those rank Gauloises.

  “And it just happened the next thing up was a copper horseshoe-shaped thing with the ends flattened from the round and flared outwards at a small angle—the whole thing seven or eight centimetres across. A nice chunky thing. Bracelet, anklet, bangle, pendant, part of a primitive machine, a sort of handcuff-thing? Some sort of weapon-thing, brass-knuckly-thing, perhaps? and with creepy humility I said that my guess—and it was only a guess—was that it was a manilla, a sort of coinage—cowries, beads, that sort of idea—made in Britain for trading with the West African tribes. And if that was indeed what it was, then it had probably been made in the early-nineteenth century in Wales—near Swansea—where local ore and local furnace coal for smelting and a seaport combine to—oh, I was sickening.

  “And I ended up being even more insufferable about a Cotman watercolour. Annabel had identified it as such and I said she was absolutely right, it was Cotman, and, with certainty, a Cotman prior to 1831, after which date he employed watercolour mixed with rice-paste producing thereby an impasto rather vulgar when compared with the almost ethereal delicacy…

  “And this innocuous ‘game’ was, of course, the ‘entrance exam.’

  “The devious buggers!

  “So now Annabel and I are being groomed.

  “Couture, yes,” he said tapping his head, “mental note.”

  “How,” said Rob, “did you know all that stuff?”

  “Well, that’s it, isn’t it?” said James, laid his hands flat on the table. “‘Stuff’ is what it is. What does it signify? Where’s its depth? It’s a magpie talent.”

  “Oh! come on!” said Rob.

  “No,” said James, “no. Fluent bollocks, really,” he said. “Entirely accurate, of course, as far as it went. But underneath the sheen, and I’d be the first to admit it…

  …well, admit it to you…

  …maybe glib’s what I’m good at.”

  He fell silent.

  Sat looking away from the table, looking out across the restaurant, looking into some bleakness.

  Rob had the sense not to say anything.

  He felt the silence as deeply uncomfortable.

  James gave a sigh and turned back to the table.

  “Do you remember, Rob,” he said suddenly, an animation relaxing and filling his face, “when we were kids, mmm? And I’d get you to pretend to ask me about a hallmark—remember that?—so I could say to you,

  “‘Pass me my loupe.’”

  *

  “Rents,” said James, “are, of course, near impossible, but Charlie Burchill secured me the attic where he lives, Chelsea, very handy. He charmed the owner, who’s the relict—delicious word, ‘relict’—of a man who was something impossibly grand in the army. She wears what Charlie describes as ‘heather’ clothing and goes for walkies with her collie every day, thumping along with a cut-down shepherd’s crook. Charlie and I have been designated her ‘young men,’ though Charlie must be at least fifty, and our principal duties are to deal with the dustbin men, who are disrespectful, and to prosecute her Daily Telegraph feud with Mr. Patel at the newsagents. And one or other of us brings the flowers.

  “Perfect, in a way. The number 14 takes you from Fulham Road and Old Church Street to Old Bond Street or the 22 takes you there from K
ing’s Road. Then I just stroll up through the Burlington Arcade and I’m more or less outside the front door.

  “I’ve painted everything in the attic a stark white and there’s nothing there except a bed and a table and chair. But—and here’s what I was setting out to tell you, we’re allowed—encouraged—to log out antiques and to live with them for a while so that—and I do deeply believe this—so that a kind of, well…”

  His fingers clenched into fists.

  “…well, an understanding far deeper than… a kind of aesthetic osmosis takes place.”

  “Yes,” said Rob, nodding.

  “So my otherwise stark little abode is enhanced by displays of—do you think we need another cognac?”

  “I would say so.”

  “In fact,” continued James, reaching down for his briefcase, “here are a couple of things…”

  He reappeared with a tiny black-velvet purse, tipped out of it onto Rob’s palm a thick, silver coin. The obverse was the head of a warrior wearing a helmet with what looked like a snake rearing up from it, while the reverse was of a half-naked man holding a club, his musculature sculpted in—Rob didn’t know quite how to express it, but sculpted in, well, blobs. He’d seen horses beautifully depicted in that way, too. Sort of Bronze Age-ish. In his mind was the White Horse at Uffington. The coin was heavy, chunky, pleasing to hold.

  “It’s a Tetradrachma of Demetrios I,” said James.

  “Who was he?” said Rob. “I like that figure on the reverse. Very powerful.”

  “He certainly was,” said James. “That’s Hercules.”

  “And who’s this Demetrios character?”

  “Ah!” said James. “He was the first Greek king after Alexander the Great to rule Bactria and northern India.”

  “Why the snake on the helmet?”

  “No, no, it’s not. It’s an elephant’s raised trunk—you know, curled back. That side piece—look—is a tusk. Alexander used to wear just such a helmet to proclaim his conquests in India in 326 B.C., so what Demetrios was signalling was that he was Alexander come again. So much history in your little hand. Gives me the shivers. Or more precisely, it gives me that Tamburlaine feeling, that is it not passing brave to be a king, and ride in triumph through Persepolis feeling.”